I always find it mildly depressing when I click on a link in an old blog post and discover that it no longer “works”. Today, for example, I wanted to see what I’d written on 15 November 2011. A link in the article sounded really interesting, even now, nearly a decade later. Yet clicking on it resulted in the following message:

I find it depressing not because it means that I ought to amend my article to exclude or change the link, which becomes a little tedious sometimes. Rather, it’s because I think of all the effort that went into sharing the ideas in the first place, and subsequently their lack of availability.

There’s a historical aspect too, which is why I have started to publish my own “On this day” posts, referring to, or updating, an article I wrote on the same day years ago. What was happening in the world of education when the original post was written? Are the ideas still useful, or true? Or were they a reflection of a long-lost set of circumstances?

Context is all-important in this regard. Just to take one example, in 2000 I started a newsletter called Computers in Classrooms. It’s still going strong, but now has a different name: Digital Education. Why the name change? Because “Computers in Classrooms” sounds completely unaspirational for most of the people who became its readers. When I published the first issue, having a computer in every classroom was something to aim for. Having two would be regarded as the apex of technological achievement, especially if supplemented by a computer room or two. These days, technology and therefore expectations have moved on. But without knowing the context in which my original newsletter was launched (in terms of technology, economics and government policy), its name would suggest that I was hopelessly out of touch.

But back to the start and the title of this article. I entered the url of the missing blog post into the Wayback Machine.

Lo and behold! There it was, still beautifully pristine as late as 2017.